DRUG FLOW: Orlando, San Juan reporters team up to track heroin
By Henry Pierson Curtis, The Orlando Sentinel
The 90-minute flight was the last leg of a 1,900-mile trip in March 1999 to trace how the drug reached Florida and what was being done to stop the flow. I was there because heroin from opium gum produced on these remote farms had killed more than 150 people on my beat in Florida.
One day into the trip, I ate lunch with Colombian President Andres Pastrana, members of a U.S. congressional delegation, the U.S. ambassador and a variety of State Department and military officers behind both countries’ anti-drug strategy.
A day later, Colombian National Police pilots offered their version of the war on drugs. The equipment sent them by the United States was second-hand junk, they said. Paid $660 a month, these pilots flew 20-year-old helicopters that couldn’t safely reach the high-altitude poppy farms. That meant the cops they carried had to hike for hours, frequently climbing hand over hand up the mountains.
Wanting to show me what they faced, a senior police aide said I could join one of the crop eradication missions if I went to the southwestern town of Neiva. For me, it would be the culmination of more than three years of reporting on heroin abuse for The Orlando Sentinel.
Following the dope
Through a series of coincidences, I broke the story in mid-1996 that teenagers and young adults in Orlando were dying from heroin. The image of heroin at the gates of Walt Disney World drew national attention.
The evolving story took me from covering police in a small Florida county to making repeated trips to Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., and Colombia.
Teaming up with Jim Leusner, the Sentinel’s federal courts reporter, we wrote more than 30 stories that spawned congressional hearings, raised allegations of racism and brought attention to a lack of Coast Guard and U.S. Customs presence in the Caribbean. The publicity helped generate anti-drug funding, increased federal law enforcement in Puerto Rico and changed the way police in Florida investigate overdose deaths.
The edict behind the Sentinel’s coverage was to investigate the international influence on local crime. Simply, we were told to follow the dope.
Until then, filing for mileage had been the biggest item on my expense account. Learning to live out of a suitcase for two weeks at a stretch was the introduction to this story without borders.
Arranging interviews in San Juan or Bogota turned out to require much the same skills needed to cover a beat anywhere – common sense, contacts, long hours and luck. I found repeated calls before leaving for a destination essential, as was following up with sources after leaving.
Fluency in Spanish helped, too.
Here’s how I stumbled on this story: By the fall of 1995, patrons of Orlando’s growing nightclub scene had been dying for a year of heroin overdoses, but the trend hadn’t been spotted by police or the medical examiner. At the time, state law didn’t require the tracking of such overdoses, and the autopsies were done by a variety of pathologists who didn’t consider their separate findings remarkable.
During late 1995 and early 1996, I spent my evenings and some weekends writing a profile of Julie Dean, 18, who died from an undetermined overdose. Wanting to write an in-depth story of the local dance scene, I found she was the youngest of that group to die of a suspected overdose.
When heroin was identified as the cause of Julie’s death, the finding was startling. State mortality records showed she was Florida’s first and only teenage heroin overdose.
The significance of her death and several others I had been following came together a week before the profile was scheduled to appear in a mid-July issue of the Sentinel’s Sunday magazine.
Upon hearing that heroin might have killed a 16-year-old boy at a party, I began checking autopsy results on all the suspected overdose deaths of victims younger than 25 in the Orlando area. My search was aided by the state’s public records law, which provides access to death records.
Helping me was Carol Gross, office manager for the Orlando’s medical examiner and the sort of public employee a reporter prays to meet sometime in a career. Within five days, records confirmed the heroin deaths of five teens and five adults under 23 during the previous year. The story, “Long Out of Sight, Heroin is Back – Killing Teens,” ran across the top of the front page on Sunday, July 14, the same day as the magazine profile.
Anger explodes
Public reaction was immediate. Churches held meetings. Politicians staged hearings, and a drug summit was attended by national drug czar Barry McCaffrey. All this happened within three months.
But one quote in the original story drew intense criticism. “Our stereotypical dealer is a Hispanic, usually a Puerto Rican male in his early 20s,” said Lt. Ernie Scott, the Orange County sheriff. “All the heroin dealers we have encountered are recent arrivals to Florida from Puerto Rico and from New York and Detroit.”
The drug agent supported his comment with records of 26 suspects arrested on charges of dealing heroin. The federal Drug Enforcement Administration also identified Puerto Rico as the primary source in Florida for South American heroin.
The reference disturbed members of Central Florida’s Hispanic community, which is dominated by immigrants from Puerto Rico. The anger grew with each new story. By year’s end, there were 20 front-page stories related to heroin, Puerto Rico and Central Florida.
In October, Leusner and I made our first trip to Puerto Rico to find out how heroin passed through the island from Colombia to Florida. Knowing someone to open doors became more important than the ability to speak Spanish. Protesters voice opposition to depiction of Puerto Rico in Sentinel drug stories. Orange County deputies arrest a man suspected of possession of heroin during an area sting.
Sources that Leusner had developed during nearly 20 years on the federal court beat in Florida repeatedly helped us obtain interviews with drug agents and drug counselors, along with government officials who otherwise wouldn’t have returned our telephone calls.
Two of the most important contacts came through The San Juan Star, Puerto Rico’s English-language newspaper. While using the newspaper’s clip library, we met police reporter Pedro Ruz Gutierrez and court reporter Oscar Serrano Negron.
On that first trip, Leusner and I broke a story about Puerto Rico’s witness protection program, which relocated 324 witnesses to the mainland without the knowledge of the U.S. Department of Justice. The witnesses included drug dealers and at least one contract killer who were sent to live without supervision in Florida and 11 other states.
The Oct. 11, 1996 headline, “San Juan Dumps Drug Dealers Here,” further angered Hispanic readers. Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Rossello’s administration challenged the story. And on Nov. 4, between 3,500 and 5,000 marchers turned out to oppose drug abuse and decry the Sentinel’s reporting on Puerto Rico.
On Nov. 7, U.S. Rep. Bill McCollum held a field hearing in Orlando and concluded the threat posed by the witness protection program had been exaggerated.
The Sentinel responded by launching a joint project with The San Juan Star to track and document the criminal behavior of as many relocated witnesses as possible. Breaking into teams of a reporter from each paper, we spent 15 days with Ruz and Serrano interviewing defense lawyers, former prosecutors, judges, homicide cops and agents of the island’s Special Investigations Bureau. Each had stories to tell about dealers and killers given a ticket to the States in return for their testimony.
The stories prompted Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles to demand and receive an agreement in 1997 that Puerto Rico would identify every witness in the state and curtail further relocations. McCollum retracted his comments and described witness-protection records as abysmal. A subsequent story prompted New York officials to demand a similar agreement after the Sentinel reported on a contract killer sent to live in Rochester on witness-protection funds and supplemented by state welfare.
Florida now tracks all heroin deaths. Other changes include the creation of a federal and state task force targeting heroin abuse in Central Florida. Drug agents go to the scene of nearly every overdose to try to identify dealers. During the most intense publicity, heroin deaths dropped to 25 in 1997 after rising from 6 in 1994 to 20 in 1995 and 37 in 1996. But deaths rebounded to 52 in 1998 and 65 in 1999.
The Sentinel continues to expand its coverage of the Caribbean and Latin America. In 1999, a bureau was opened in San Juan. My colleague, Pedro Ruz, who was hired from The San Juan Star in 1997, has spent five weeks reporting from Colombia since October 1999.
As for my trip to the poppy fields I mentioned at the beginning of this story? It ended poorly. The plane let me out on an empty airstrip in Neiva and immediately took off for Bogota. The aging police helicopters were gone. The only people around were playing soccer alongside the runway, and they turned out to be off-duty firefighters and police. A police sergeant watching the game explained that the aviation unit had left days before to destroy cocaine fields farther south. No one from Bogota told them to expect a visiting reporter.
So here’s my final bit of advice: Call ahead when you travel and double-check your arrangements.
